Tuesday, October 24, 2006

I am playing around with YUI, the Yahoo! User Interface library for generating Ajax and Web 2.0 websites. I looked at several libraries, like Dojo, Prototype, and script.aculo.us, but YUI has a lot of documentation, a great section on patterns, seems very light. I was getting close to using prototype, but it is very close to Ruby on Rails, and I am not planning to use that stack for development, so YUI it is

The YUI library has a user, Jack Slocum who has added some great extensions. He shows off the effects very well on his blog. I love the way he creates pop-up comment boxes linked to specific paragraphs of his blog, and the smoot animation. He discusses his additions quite thoroughly and clearly, and dissecting his code is very educational. I will try to add some of my understanding in some entries here. I am not sure how far I can add code on the blogger site, but I will see if I can get some life examples to work

It is clear that working on this level with JavaScript needs a thorough understanding of the language, especially it's closures and object oriented nature. I will probably create a simple test site that lets me experiment with the features. Also working to create a more ambitious application